Former Orange Superior
Court Judge Ronald Kline collapsed in court in Los Angeles yesterday upon
learning he was being sentenced to 27 months in prison for possessing child
pornography on his home computer.

Kline fell into the arms
of his attorney, Paul Meyer, as Senior U.S. District Judge Consuelo B. Marshall
was announcing his sentence shortly after noon. Court proceedings were
temporarily halted and paramedics summoned.

Kline, 66, was revived
and the hearing resumed a short time later.

The ex-jurist, a
Superior Court judge from 1995 to 2003, entered a negotiated guilty plea in
2005 to four counts of an indictment charging that he kept sexually explicit
pictures of young boys on his home computer. Three other counts of child
pornography were dropped as part of the agreement.

In entering his plea,
Kline acknowledged facing 27 to 33 months in federal prison if Marshall
followed the Sentencing Guidelines. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that while
a guideline sentence must be calculated in every case, the guidelines are not
binding on the judge, who may impose a sentence above or below the guideline as
long as it is reasonable.

Kline faced a statutory
maximum sentence of 20 years. He has been on home confinement for five years
and must forfeit state contributions to his pension as a result of the plea
agreement.

Sex Offender

The Irvine resident will
be required to register as a sex offender once he is released from prison.
Prosecutors have previously expressed concerns that he would be a risk after
his release, citing a diary in which he recounted following children in
shopping malls and being attracted to boys when he worked as a volunteer
baseball umpire.

Kline was originally
charged after a Canadian hacker used a computer program to download diary
entries and other images from the judge’s computers. The hacked information was
turned over to Pedowatch, a Colorado watchdog group, which notified Irvine
police.

In 2003, Marshall ruled
that the hacker, Bradley Willman of British Columbia, was working as a
government agent when he hacked Kline’s computer, and suppressed the
prosecution’s evidence because there was no search warrant.

But a Ninth U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals panel, while agreeing that the search was illegal, said it was
“private” and thus did not implicate the Fourth Amendment and the exclusionary
rule.

Willman had attached a
“Trojan Horse” virus to pornographic images of children on the Internet. The
virus, which is downloaded onto an individual’s computer when that individual
downloads an image to which the virus is attached, enabled Willman to open,
alter, and download files on the infected computer.

Kline is a former
partner in the law firm of Haight, Brown & Bonesteel, where he was a
managing partner before then-Gov. Pete Wilson appointed him to the bench in
1995. He is a graduate of Rice University in Houston, obtained his law degree
at the University of Texas, and practiced in Houston before coming to
California in the 1970s.

Molestation Charges

The criminal charges
resulted in the demise of his career. He was arrested after the filing deadline
for the 2002 primary, but 11 write-in candidates filed to oppose him and he
came in second in the voting.

He later obtained a
court ruling permitting him to withdraw from the general election. Kline’s
career officially ended in January 2003 when his term expired, although he had
been off the bench for months as a result of being under home confinement.

Kline was also charged
in Orange Superior Court with molesting a former neighbor when the accuser was
14 years old in 1979. The man came forward after learning about the child
pornography arrest.

The charges were dropped
after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down California’s law allowing revival of
previously unreported child molestation charges if there was independent
corroborating evidence. The high court said the law violated the Constitution’s
Ex Post Facto Clause.